Then and There Coming next Search

Self-Strengthening, episode 11

Tonkin

France is taking Vietnam, another of the Qing's tributaries, and in 1882 a French naval officer seizes Hanoi. The episode follows Li Hongzhang, who wants a bargain that avoids war, and Prince Gong, who has run the court's foreign affairs for twenty years and is thrown out with the whole Grand Council in April 1884 when the Qing armies lose in Tonkin, and asks whether Cixi dismissed him over the war or to take the court back for herself. It leans on foreign observers and scholars, with the court heard in its own decrees.

Listen in Apple Podcasts Spotify

Hanoi, Tonkin Shanghai Beijing Guangzhou Tianjin
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Henri Rivière
Henri Rivière. Antoine Samuel Adam-Salomon, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, a riot in Seoul in the summer of 1882 burned the Japanese legation and put the Korean king's father back in power. Li Hongzhang acted fast, relying on the new telegraph. He had the old prince carried off to China and held under guard in Tianjin. But when the court asked Li whether China should go further and fight Japan, he told the throne that Japan's fleet must be admitted to be equal to China's, and that it would be hazardous to fight in Japanese waters. Four million taels a year had been promised for the navy and the coast. Li's department, he complained, had received only a quarter of it. So Li's answer was to wait, and build. The trouble with waiting is that it only works if everyone else waits too. And while Li was watching Korea, in the northeast, a second tributary kingdom was being taken from the Qing at the other end of the empire, in the far south. This is the story of Vietnam, and of how China and France slid into a war over it, a war Beijing would in the end declare in order to protect its old tributary. And it is the story of what that war did at the very top of the Qing state, where Prince Gong, for more than twenty years in effect the empire's chancellor, was about to be removed from office. Let me start with the map, because almost nobody in the West had one in their head at the time. Vietnam runs down the eastern edge of the Southeast Asian mainland in a long thin S, from the border of China's southern provinces almost to the Gulf of Thailand. Since 1802 it had been ruled by the Nguyen dynasty, from a capital at Hue, in the narrow middle of the country. The north, the land around the Red River and its delta, with the old city of Hanoi at its heart, was called Tonkin. The Red River itself rises in Yunnan, in China's southwest, and runs down through Tonkin to the sea. And for centuries, Vietnam's rulers had sent tribute missions to the emperor in Beijing, as Korea's did. I should say what that meant, because it will matter for everything that follows. A tributary kingdom sent envoys and gifts to the emperor on a fixed schedule, its kings were invested by him, and they used his calendar. In return the emperor left them to run their own affairs, and in a crisis he might send help. To the Qing, that was a real bond, a family relationship between a senior and a junior. To a European foreign ministry, it looked like nothing a court of law would recognise. That gap, between what the Qing thought it meant and what France was prepared to admit it meant, is the whole war in miniature. France had come to Vietnam from the south. French forces took Saigon in 1859, and by 1867 France had annexed the whole of the far south and ruled it as a colony, which it called Cochinchina. What French merchants and naval officers wanted next was the north, and above all the Red River, because they dreamed it could be a back door into the markets of China's southwest. They had tried once already. In 1873 a young French officer named Francis Garnier had stormed the citadel of Hanoi with a handful of men, and within weeks he was dead, killed in an ambush outside the city. France pulled back, and signed a treaty with the Vietnamese court in 1874 that recognised Vietnam as independent and opened the Red River to trade. Remember that word independent. It did to Vietnam what the Japanese treaty had done to Korea. It said, in effect, that there was no Qing emperor standing behind the king. There had been a merchant in that story too, a Frenchman named Jean Dupuis, who had sailed shiploads of arms up the Red River to the Qing commanders fighting a Muslim rebellion in Yunnan. His voyages proved the river could carry trade all the way into China, and his quarrels with the Vietnamese officials in Hanoi were what had brought Garnier north in the first place. So the pattern was already set. A Frenchman goes north on his own initiative, the Vietnamese court protests, the Black Flags appear, and Paris has to decide whether it stands behind the man on the spot. I'll introduce the Black Flags properly when they come back into the story. For now, just know that they were the people who had killed Garnier. Which brings us to our first character. His name was Henri Rivière, and he was a French naval officer in his fifties, a captain who was also a published novelist and playwright, a man with a taste for adventure stories who decided to live one. In 1882 the French governor in Saigon sent him north with a few hundred men, officially to protect French traders on the Red River. His orders were to avoid a fight if he possibly could, which, as it turned out, was asking a great deal of this particular captain. He arrived in Hanoi on 25 March 1882. The Vietnamese officials in the city were alarmed at what his arrival might mean, and they strengthened and reinforced the citadel. On the French side, it was thought necessary to take the citadel and dismantle it. The French took it in April 1882. The Vietnamese governor of Hanoi, who had been charged with holding the citadel, hanged himself. But the fall of the citadel was the thing that finally forced China to act. For the Qing this was not some distant colonial squabble. Tonkin bordered two Chinese provinces, Guangxi and Yunnan, and the Red River that Rivière's men were sitting on ran straight up into Yunnan. A French Tonkin would mean a masterful European power as China's neighbour on its southern frontier, in place of a weak tributary kingdom. Britain was already pressing on the empire's southwest from Burma, and Russia on its northwest. Now France was coming up from the south. For the next year, Rivière's small force sat in Hanoi and could manage only a few small operations. Small, but pointed. In the spring of 1883 he sent men to seize the coal mines on the coast at Hon Gai, and he took the delta town of Nam Dinh. Each step went a little further than the last, and each one made the next easier. A French captain with a writer's imagination had planted his flag in a city that the Qing still thought of as part of their family. And the man in China who had to decide what to do about it was the same man we left watching Korea.

Li Hongzhang
Li Hongzhang. Russell & Sons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Li Hongzhang was the governor general of Zhili, the province around Beijing, and he lived and worked in the port of Tianjin, a few hours from the capital. He was the commissioner for the northern ports, the court's man for anything involving foreigners in the north, and in practice he was its chief negotiator with the Western powers. He had spent nearly twenty years building arsenals and a better armed army, and lately the beginnings of a fleet in the north. His instinct, faced with France in Tonkin, was the instinct he had shown over Korea. Make a bargain. Avoid a war China could not be sure of winning. And at first, it looked as if he had pulled it off. Towards the end of 1882 he scored what looked like an important success over the French minister to China, a diplomat named Bourée. The two of them worked out an arrangement under which Tonkin was to be divided into two zones, one Chinese and one French. It was signed at Shanghai. China agreed to withdraw her troops from Tonkin, and to allow trade into Yunnan by the Red River route. That last point needs a word of explanation. There were already Chinese soldiers in Tonkin. Troops from the neighbouring provinces of Guangxi and Yunnan had crossed the border, as they had in earlier years, at the invitation of the Vietnamese court, to help put down bandits in the hills. So the deal was a trade. China would pull those soldiers back, and in return France promised to make no conquests and to respect the sovereignty of Vietnam. China accepted it fully. It was, in its way, a very Li Hongzhang solution: give up a little that you cannot hold, keep the shape of the old relationship, and get on with building. Notice, too, who was not at the table. Nobody asked the Vietnamese court what it thought of having its northern provinces divided between two foreign powers. That was not unusual, for either China or France, in those years. But it tells you what both sides thought the argument was really about. Then Paris looked at it. The French government repudiated the arrangement, and recalled Bourée. French politics, in those years, were in too disturbed a state for a wise decision to be taken. In February 1883 a new prime minister took office in Paris, Jules Ferry, a republican who believed that France needed colonies, markets and naval bases to stand among the great powers. Ferry would push the Tonkin venture so hard that his enemies at home ended up calling him by the name of the place. And for Ferry, a deal that left half of Tonkin to China was not a success. It was a surrender. Li's bargain had not survived a change of government in Paris. It would not be the last of his bargains to die young.

Prince Gong
Prince Gong. John Thomson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On 26 April 1883 Ferry's government asked the French parliament for five and a half million francs for an expedition to Tonkin, and it was voted on 15 May. Four days after that vote, Rivière was dead. I'll come back to how he died in a moment, because the man who killed him deserves an introduction of his own. For now, what matters is how France took the news. France answered by putting together a mixed force under a general named Bouet and Admiral Courbet, with a civilian commissioner named Harmand to manage the politics. Courbet is a name to hold on to. He was the ablest commander France had in the east, and before this war was over, he would do more damage to China than anyone else in it. The French aimed their first blow not at Hanoi, but at the Vietnamese court itself. Then, in July 1883, the Vietnamese emperor Tu Duc died, after more than thirty years on the throne, and the court at Hue fell into a struggle over who should succeed him. He had no son of his own, and in the space of a few months the throne passed through several hands, as factions at court made emperors and unmade them. In August, Courbet's ships bombarded the forts guarding the river mouth below Hue and stormed them, and Harmand went up to the capital to dictate terms. He gave the Vietnamese ministers a stark choice: accept French protection, or see their kingdom wiped off the map. The treaty that the Vietnamese court signed that month was short and blunt. Its first article read: "Annam recognises and accepts the protectorate of France." France would control the relations of all foreign powers with the Vietnamese government. And the treaty named one of those powers specifically: China. Tonkin was placed, for purposes of government, under French residents. And the whole course of the Red River was to be held by French military posts, for as long as that might seem necessary. It confirmed the treaty of 1874 and went far beyond it. The Vietnamese kingdom had been placed under the feet of France. For the Qing, the clause that named China was the insult. A tributary king had just signed away the right to deal with his own overlord, except through Paris. In Beijing, the office that had to answer that was the Zongli Yamen. The Zongli Yamen was the court's office for foreign affairs. It had been set up in 1861, after the Anglo-French capture of Beijing, because the empire had no ministry for dealing with Western states as equals. And its head, from the day it opened, was Prince Gong. Prince Gong was a son of the Daoguang Emperor and a younger brother of the emperor who had fled Beijing in 1860. He had stayed behind to negotiate with the British and the French while the old Summer Palace burned. In 1884 he was about fifty years old. For more than twenty years he had been the man foreign ministers dealt with when they dealt with China, and the man who had to explain China's position to them, one patient note at a time. His office refused to recognise the treaty of Hue. Vietnam, in the Qing view, was still a tributary, and a tributary could not hand itself to another power by signing a paper. China told France plainly that if French troops met Chinese troops in Tonkin, a conflict would certainly arise. China's man in Europe was Marquis Zeng Jize, the eldest son of the great general Zeng Guofan, who had saved the dynasty from the Taiping rebels. Zeng had been minister in London and Paris since 1879, and he was one of the very few Qing officials of his generation who had taught himself English. He told the French that if they advanced on the Tonkin towns of Son Tay, Hung Hoa and Bac Ninh, they would find Chinese troops there, and a collision would be inevitable. China warned that any attack on Son Tay and Bac Ninh would be regarded as a cause for war. France proposed instead a neutral zone between Chinese territory and the French sphere, and the opening of a town on the Yunnan border to trade. Nothing came of it. In July 1883 China had asked the American government to mediate. France rejected the mediation. And in August the French declared a blockade of the Vietnamese coast. Each side was talking past the other. The French said they were dealing with Vietnam, and China had no business there. The Qing said that anything done to Vietnam was done to them. And nobody had yet said the one word that would have settled the question. The French government, for its part, was firmly against any formal declaration of war. On 16 November 1883, the Zongli Yamen sent a note to the French minister and to the representatives of all the treaty powers, setting out China's case. There was a small embarrassment buried in it. Marquis Zeng had officially and repeatedly told Paris that there were no Chinese troops in Tonkin, and now the note from Beijing as good as admitted that there were. The supple hand of Li Hongzhang, some thought, could be traced in that. So the Qing had drawn a line. Son Tay, Bac Ninh. Cross it, and it's war. Now let me introduce the people who were actually standing on that line.

Liu Yongfu
Liu Yongfu. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

His name was Liu Yongfu, and he was not, strictly speaking, a Qing soldier at all. He came from the borderlands of southern China, and he had grown up in the years of rebellion that tore through Guangxi in the middle of the century. When the Qing armies crushed the rebel bands there in the 1860s, Liu led what was left of his band south across the border into the hills of northern Vietnam. His men fought under black banners, and they were known as the Black Flags. They settled along the upper Red River, near the border town of Lao Cai, where they taxed the river trade, and the Vietnamese court, which could not dislodge them, decided to use them instead. It gave Liu official rank and set his men against bandits and, before long, against the French. It was Liu's Black Flags who had killed Francis Garnier outside Hanoi in 1873. So they were irregulars, mercenaries if you like, Chinese by birth, in Vietnamese pay, with the quiet sympathy of the Qing provincial officials across the border. By the spring of 1883, Liu Yongfu and his Black Flags were camped near Hanoi, facing Rivière's garrison. He did something no European officer would have expected. He issued a challenge. The Black Flag commander challenged his opponent to come out into the open and fight. The challenge came in the form of a proclamation, addressed to the French in the city. It accused France of seeking to conquer the Vietnamese kingdom, and of hiding behind what it called "the dummy of international commerce" while it cast its treaty aside. And then it turned to the French directly. "Know, ye French robbers, that I come to meet you. Rely on your strength and rapine, and lead forth your herd of sheep and curs to meet my army of heroes and see who will be master." Liu told them he had picked out an open space as the field where he would establish his fame. If they admitted they were no match for him, they could still save their lives. All they had to do was behead their own leaders, bring the heads to his headquarters, leave the city and go home. Near its end came a warning: "Take heed and yield while yet you may. Be not as mules and involve yourselves in ruin." It's hard to imagine a document better designed to get a proud man out of his fortress. It worked. Rivière had been reinforced. On 19 May 1883, he led a sortie out of Hanoi, and he was killed in the fight that followed. The column ran into the Black Flags a few miles west of the city, near a small bridge, and was cut to pieces. It was almost exactly the spot where Francis Garnier had been killed by the same men, ten years before. Rivière was wounded, and afterwards his head was cut off. A man who had come north looking for adventure had found more of it than he wanted. That was the challenge France had accepted, when it put Bouet and Courbet in command to settle the Tonkin question. Through the second half of 1883, the French built up their strength in the delta. The first great test was Son Tay, the strategic centre of the rivers of Tonkin. Courbet himself led the attack. The Black Flags bore the brunt of the defence, and the French took heavy losses before the town was carried. Son Tay was taken by assault on 16 December 1883, and Chinese imperial troops were among its garrison. Liu Yongfu and what was left of his men fell back up the river, still fighting. So the line the Qing had drawn had been crossed, and there had been Qing soldiers on it. Prince Gong never pretended otherwise. When the French took Bac Ninh too, three months later, he told the German envoy that the imperial troops had taken part in the defence, according to their orders. It was a brave answer. It was also the answer of a government at war, and the Qing had still not said that it was at war. The second test was Bac Ninh. It was the strongest post in the delta. Qing regulars from Guangxi held it. In March 1884, a new French commander, General Millot, marched on it with two brigades. Bac Ninh fell on 12 March 1884. The Qing troops gave it up with hardly a fight. The governor of Guangxi, who commanded the Qing armies in the delta, was stripped of his office and arrested. None of this was a final verdict on the war. French troops would need several years to defeat the Vietnamese and their Chinese allies. But that winter and the following spring, it went badly for China, town after town, on ground the Qing had said they would defend. And the fall of those towns gave the Chinese government serious cause for reflection. In Beijing, the reflection took a very particular form.

To understand what happened next, you need to know who was really running the Qing court. The emperor was a boy. The Guangxu Emperor had been put on the throne in 1875 at the age of three, and in 1884 he was twelve. He had come to the throne because his aunt chose him. His aunt was the Empress Dowager Cixi. An empress dowager is the mother, or the senior widow, of an emperor. Cixi was the mother of the emperor before Guangxu, the Tongzhi Emperor, who had died young, and she ruled for her nephew as regent, from behind a screen in the audience hall. For twenty years she had shared the regency with a second empress dowager, the widow of her late husband. But that colleague, Ci'an, had died in 1881, and since then Cixi had ruled alone. And for twenty years, the other great power at court had been Prince Gong. The two of them had seized power together in 1861, in a palace coup against the regents named by the dying emperor. After that she had needed him, and she had also never quite trusted him. In 1865 she had stripped him of his highest title in an edict that accused him of arrogance, and then given most of his posts back when the court found it could not do without him. He had been humbled and restored more than once since. He was clever, proud and quick, and he had the habits of a man who had been the second most powerful person in the empire for most of his adult life. The government in Beijing, then, was not one person. It was a balance between the empress dowager in the palace and the prince who ran the councils. The councils were two. One was the Zongli Yamen, the foreign office. The other, and the more important, was the Grand Council. The Grand Council was a small body of five or six of the highest ministers, who met the throne every morning before dawn, read the memorials that came in from the provinces, and drafted the edicts that went out. Whoever led the Grand Council stood closer to the throne than anyone else in the empire. And for most of two decades, that man had been Prince Gong. Then Bac Ninh fell. The new telegraph lines had changed what it meant to run a war. One official observed that the court could now direct military affairs from ten thousand li away as if they were in the courtyard of its own home. A li is the traditional Chinese unit of distance, about a third of a mile, so ten thousand li was a way of saying the far end of the earth. It also meant that every defeat landed on the desks of the men in charge almost as soon as it happened. And there was a group at court that had been waiting for exactly this. They were young scholar officials, many of them censors or members of the Hanlin Academy, the imperial college of the empire's top scholars, and they were known as the Pure Current. They wrote memorials, many memorials, demanding a firm line against France and denouncing anyone who talked of compromise, and Li Hongzhang was their favourite target. At the start of April 1884, an official at court sent up a memorial blaming the defeats in Tonkin on the men at the top. On 8 April 1884, Prince Gong was driven from office. He kept his princely rank, but nothing else. And he did not go alone. Every member of the Grand Council was dismissed with him, the whole body at a stroke, including the boy emperor's own tutor, Weng Tonghe. It was a clean sweep of the men at the top of the government. The decree of the empress dowager removed him together with most of his colleagues of the Zongli Yamen. He was replaced at the head of the government by another prince of the imperial clan, Prince Qing. Prince Qing was a distant cousin of the emperor, a minor prince with none of Prince Gong's experience, who owed his rise to the empress dowager. The new Grand Council was led by another imperial prince, Prince Li, and it was told to consult, on every important matter, Prince Chun, the young emperor's own father, who had given up his offices when his son came to the throne. Prince Chun was Prince Gong's younger brother. He was also married to Cixi's younger sister, and he had a long reputation as a hardliner toward foreigners. So the last word on the court's foreign policy now lay with a man who sat on none of its councils. The man who had run China's foreign affairs for more than twenty years was gone, just when China needed a foreign policy most. He had been the patron of nearly everything new the Qing state had tried in dealing with the outside world: the school for interpreters in Beijing, Hart's Customs, the first Chinese legations abroad. None of those things vanished with him. But they had lost the one man at the top who had always argued for them. Why did she do it? Here the sources disagree. The official occasion was the war. He was dismissed on the occasion of the French capture of Son Tay and Bac Ninh. But there is another story, in which her real reason had nothing to do with France. Cixi, in this telling, believed that the prince was intriguing against her with the young emperor. You can see how both stories might be true at once. The boy would grow up. One day he would rule in his own name, and whoever was close to him then would matter more than an aging regent. A defeat in Tonkin gave her the occasion. Whether it was also the reason, nobody outside the palace could know. What is certain is the result. With Prince Gong gone, there was no one at court who could stand up to Cixi as an equal. The new men owed their places to her. Prince Gong, whom some of you will meet again, older and recalled to office in another war, withdrew from the court. He would spend the next ten years out of power. And there was one more irony. The men who had been thrown out were blamed for losing the war. But the court that replaced them did not fight harder. It looked for a way out. And the man it turned to for the way out was Li Hongzhang.

Li's way out arrived through an unlikely door, a German in Chinese service. His name was Gustav Detring. He was a commissioner in the Chinese Maritime Customs, the service that collected the duties on China's foreign trade. The Customs was a Chinese government office, but it was staffed at the top by foreigners and run by an Irishman, Sir Robert Hart, its inspector general in Beijing. Detring had spent years as the Customs commissioner at Tianjin, where he had become one of Li's most trusted advisers. He had joined the Customs as a young man in the 1860s, and he would spend the rest of his working life at Li's elbow, as adviser, go between and fixer. Hart's Customs had a way of producing men like that, foreigners who served the Qing state and believed in it, and who could talk to Western officers in their own language and to Li in his. That spring, he was in the south. Guangzhou, the great southern port, was recognised as a probable target for the French forces. Detring took charge of the Customs there on 31 March 1884, and handed it over again on 7 April. Getting there was the interesting part. From Hong Kong to Guangzhou, he accepted the hospitality of Admiral Lespès, Courbet's second in command, on a small French warship, the Volta, commanded by a naval captain named Fournier. So for the length of a river journey, a German who had Li Hongzhang's ear sat on the deck of a French warship with a French officer who wanted to talk. And the French officer did want to talk. Fournier had a proposal for direct negotiations with Li, and Detring carried it. The proposal was simple. Let Li and Fournier sit down together at Tianjin and settle the whole thing between them. In Guangzhou, Detring went to the governor general and urged him to lose no time in telling Li Hongzhang that the city could not be defended. It was a frightening message, and probably a fair one. Li then summoned Detring, whose judgment he trusted, to Tianjin. Guangzhou, meanwhile, got a new governor general that spring: Zhang Zhidong, one of the most famous scholars of the Pure Current, a man who had made his name at court by demanding that the empire stand up to foreigners. Now he would have to defend a city a German customs officer had just declared indefensible. Detring arrived in the north with the warning, the offer and the name of the man to talk to. And in a court that had just thrown out its whole government, nobody was in a hurry to stop him.

Within a month of Prince Gong's fall, Li had a deal. He and Captain Fournier met at Tianjin, and on 11 May 1884 they signed a short convention, only a few articles long. China undertook to withdraw immediately the Chinese garrisons then in Tonkin. France, for its part, waived any claim to an indemnity, and China allowed freedom of trade between Tonkin and the neighbouring Chinese provinces. Read that again, and you'll see what Li was giving away. The terms practically ceded Tonkin to France. What Li got in return was that France would not ask China for money. The convention pledged China to the immediate withdrawal of all her forces. At Tianjin, the two negotiators fell into each other's arms. A French naval captain and the most powerful official in northern China, embracing. It was that kind of moment. There was something for China's pride in it, too. France promised to respect and protect China's southern frontier, and to put nothing in its future treaty with Vietnam that would insult the dignity of the Qing emperor. In other words, Li gave up the substance of the tributary relationship, and tried to keep its face. On every essential point, China had given way to France. In making these concessions Li had acted as a real statesman, a man who could see more clearly than others where the empire was weak. But he was not master in the empire. The convention had to be carried out by a court that had not signed it, and that court had its own ideas. Remember, this was a court that had just thrown out its whole government for losing towns in Tonkin. It was not in a mood to sign Tonkin away. The empress dowager had declared that peace could be made only on four conditions. The two most important of the four had not been met. And so the imperial government was unable, or unwilling, to give the order to carry out the convention. In other words, Li had signed a treaty his own government would not put into effect. You can see why Li signed it anyway. He had already told the throne that Japan's fleet was the equal of China's. France had the second largest navy in the world. The censors and the young scholars at court, the men who called most loudly for war, attacked the agreement as a betrayal, and Li with it. There was one more problem, and it was about dates. The convention said China would withdraw immediately. But when, exactly, and from where? A memorandum of dates was drawn up, setting out when each post in Tonkin would be handed over. Fournier agreed to it and, by his own account, so did Li. Li told it differently. He declared that Fournier had agreed to leave out the exact dates, and to have the withdrawal settled on the spot. Fournier himself declared that he had done no such thing. Two men had fallen into each other's arms, and they had come away remembering two different treaties. Maybe one of them was lying. Maybe neither was. Maybe each heard what he needed to hear, across an interpreter, in the warmth of the moment. It would not be the last time that an agreement depended on what was said in a room rather than what was written on a page. The French believed they had a timetable. The Qing troops in Tonkin had no orders. And in June, a French column set out to take over a Chinese post on the road north.

French marines deploy beneath cliffs at Bac Le, June 1884, in a picture dated 1890
French marines deploy beneath cliffs at Bac Le, June 1884, in a picture dated 1890. Jean-François-Alphonse Lecomte, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A force of nine hundred men under a Colonel Dugenne was sent to occupy Lang Son. Lang Son was a walled town on the road to the Chinese border. Lang Son was one of the posts the French believed China had agreed to hand over. In June the French military authorities, under instructions, demanded that the Chinese garrison withdraw. The road ran through a place called Bac Le, and there, on 23 June 1884, the column found Qing troops in its path. Their commander informed Colonel Dugenne by letter that they had no instructions to evacuate. He refused to withdraw because he had received no orders to do so, either from the Zongli Yamen or from Li. Dugenne had no Chinese interpreter with him to explain exactly what the letter said, and he at once pushed his attack. The French lost twenty two killed and sixty eight wounded. The fighting went on for two days. The Qing troops fought back hard, and the column had to retreat. So who was to blame? Here the sources disagree. On the French side, there was a memorandum of dates, which Fournier said Li had accepted. By that timetable the Qing troops should have been gone, and to Paris, Bac Le was an ambush, a treaty broken by treachery. The French newspapers called it the Bac Le ambush, and they demanded that China pay for it. On the Chinese side, Li said no dates had been agreed, and the commander at Bac Le had in fact received no orders from Beijing or from Tianjin to leave. And some who knew Li believed he had hoped, and even hinted, that the French on the spot would find a way to get what they wanted without his having to commit himself any further. That would explain a great deal: a negotiator who had promised more than his court would carry out, and who hoped that men on the ground would close the gap for him. In the end the verdict that stuck was a gentle one. The Qing government was acquitted of treachery, and Bac Le was recognised as an honest misunderstanding. But that verdict came later. That summer, nobody in Paris was in the mood for misunderstandings. And in Beijing the clash had an unexpected effect. The Zongli Yamen was encouraged by it. It now insisted that Lang Son and Lao Cai must stay occupied by Chinese troops until the whole question of the frontier had been settled. After months of losing towns, a Qing force had stood its ground and sent a French column back down the road. Everyone, on both sides, drew the wrong lesson from it. The French concluded that China could not be trusted to keep a treaty, and would have to be made to pay. The war party in Beijing concluded that the French could be beaten, and that Li's caution had been cowardice. Both of those conclusions would be tested, very soon, and at sea. And the man caught between them, once again, was Li Hongzhang.

France's answer was an ultimatum. The French minister to China, Patenôtre, obtained permission from his government to present an ultimatum demanding the immediate withdrawal of the Chinese forces from Tonkin. Patenôtre had come north by way of Hue. In June 1884 he had signed a new treaty there that made the French protectorate over Vietnam permanent. At that signing, the seal the Qing emperors had given the kings of Vietnam, the token of their investiture as tributaries, was melted down in front of the French envoy. So the man who now presented France's demands to the Qing had just watched the last physical sign of China's place in Vietnam turned into a lump of metal. It demanded the immediate execution of the Fournier convention, and an indemnity of two hundred and fifty million francs. That was the convention in which France had given up any claim to an indemnity. The French reasoning was that China had broken the convention at Bac Le, and so France was owed for the men it had lost and the war it now had to fight. The Qing reasoning was that there was nothing to pay for, because there had been no betrayal, only a quarrel about dates. And France made it clear how it meant to collect. The guarantees the French government had in mind were the docks and arsenals at Fuzhou and Nanjing. The Fuzhou Navy Yard had been founded by Zuo Zongtang. The arsenal at Nanjing had been founded by Li Hongzhang. Between them, they were the proudest work of twenty years of self strengthening. So France was not just asking for money. It was asking for the hostages it would take if the money did not come. And it gave China days, not weeks, to answer. The court gave way on half of it. The withdrawal of the troops from Tonkin was ordered by an imperial decree of 16 July 1884. But China rejected the claim for an indemnity. And at court, the voices for war had a champion with real victories behind him: Zuo Zongtang, the old general who had won back the far west for the dynasty. Zuo begged the empress dowager to pay no further heed to counsels of conciliation. After Bac Le, it was not hard to listen to him. Li Hongzhang, for his part, had seen one agreement thrown out by Paris and another that his own court was unwilling to carry out. He had nothing left to offer either of them. Think about where that left the Qing state, a little over two years after Rivière walked into Hanoi. The tributary kingdom it had promised to protect had signed itself over to France. The armies it had sent to defend Tonkin had lost the walled towns of the delta one after another. The prince who had run its foreign affairs for a generation was sitting at home. The negotiator who had tried to buy peace had been disowned by his own court. And the loudest voices at court were calling for war. There is one more thing you need to know about that summer. While the diplomats argued, the French navy had been moving. In the middle of July, Admiral Courbet had brought his ships into the anchorage at Fuzhou, and the imperial officials there had received him in the most friendly way. The anchorage lay well up the Min River, below the city, close by the Navy Yard. They were anchored a short way from the Chinese fleet, and from the Navy Yard France had just named as its guarantee. Nobody had declared war. The officials at Fuzhou were courteous, the French were polite, and the guns on both sides were loaded. On one side of the anchorage lay the ships and the shipyard that two decades of self strengthening had built. On the other lay a squadron of the second largest navy in the world, waiting for an order from Paris. Next time, in August, the French ships open fire, and the proudest work of self strengthening lasts less than an hour.

Sources